For this installment of Into the Pensieve: Wrock in Retrospect, we are going back to 2009. That was the year that Swish and Flick recorded the album With Love and Poison for the Wizard Rock EP of the Month Club.

The Wizard Rock EP of the Month Club was an endeavor spearheaded by Paul DeGeorge of Harry and the Potters, which made CD’s (remember those?) and mailed them to subscribers. Proceeds benefited the Harry Potter Alliance. This was a very DIY and hands-on effort to help distribute wizard rock at a time when selling CD’s was still a viable and important means of spreading wrock around the world. Each eco-friendly paper sleeve encasing the discs were stamped by hand with the EP art.

With Love and Poison featured four new Swish and Flick songs: “Love Me Luna”, “Slytherin Weekend”, “Amortentia”, and “Quidditch Witch”. It was the second and final album released by Swish and Flick. The last track on the EP would go on to become a crowd-participation favorite at Swish and Flick live performances, thanks to contributing vocalists who gave their voices to the “Quidditch Witch” rally cry.

One of my all-time favorite wizard rockers was, and still is, Zoe Bromelow, whose prolific musical projects include Split Seven Ways and Malfoy Manor. She was one of the first wizard rockers I befriended on MySpace, where an online community of magical musical people had thrived in the early days. In 2009, Zoe, a UK native, happened to be spending a couple of months in The States to work on music with Athena Reddy (actor, writer and artist; and wrocker known as Nagini), a project called The Vashta Nerada. Zoe and Athena performed two shows of note in the city, one in Williamsburg Brooklyn, and one at the famed Sidewalk Cafe in Manhattan.

While Zoe was in town, I jumped at the opportunity to have such a unique and beloved voice grace the tracks of a Swish and Flick song. She traveled up to Yonkers, a suburb just outside the city, where John Pisani and I had been operating Dungeon Studios (formerly Bedroom Studios, presently Luckington Place Studios in Irvington) since 2001.

Our recording and rehearsal studio was literally in the corner bedroom of our apartment, much to my neighbors’ dismay. But to several wizard rockers through the years, it offered free use of professional-grade gear and a chill place to record songs or to practice before a gig in the city. This was where we recorded all of Swish and Flick’s songs, including “Quidditch Witch”.

While reminiscing about this recording session a few days ago, Zoe recalls, “It was so fun! I was so embarrassed trying to rap though and became about twenty-five percent more English than usual. Also your budgie bit me because budgies are small angry dinosaurs.”

Anyone who has ever been to Swish and Flick’s former apartment knows about our birds, a parakeet named Pikachu and a quaker parrot named Yoshi, who were allowed to leave their cage whenever they wished, even while we hosted recording sessions or wizard rock house shows. Sadly, that apartment and those birds are no longer with us.

But bird friends aside, Zoe’s British accent was perfect for the line, “You can’t front on that!”, inspired by a sample on the Beastie Boys’ song, “So What’Cha Want“, and evocative of Nena Cherry’s very British delivery of the line, “Wot’s he like anyway?” in “Buffalo Stance“.

Zoe’s is among the many voices heard near the end of the song, chanting, “Chasers, beaters, hexing Death Eaters. Keeper, seeker, all the boys are weaker.”

When I wrote that part of the song, I imagined that it was the quidditch equivalent of a football (soccer) chant, something that spectators would shout in unison to get the girls amped up to kick butt on the pitch. Layering recordings of my own voice wouldn’t suffice. I wanted several different voices, much like in our song, “Hogwarts House Party”.

Speaking of “HHP”, the first vocalists I recruited for “Quidditch Witch” were my family members, who were featured on our previous album, In The House of Slytherin. My nieces, Lucianna and Giavanna, were among the enthusiastic voices recorded for the rally cry. Though our daughter Chloe (age 3 at the time) was a very supportive spectator during the recording session, ultimately, she refused to put her voice on the track. John claims that she can be heard whining in the background, but you probably won’t be able to hear her without good headphones. My nephew Isaiah was absent from the recording session because we wanted to make it a “girls thing”, though I now regret not including him on the track. He was great on “Hogwarts House Party”.

Besides the rally cry, there is another notable section of the song, in which we point out the unspoken sexist policy of the Slytherin quidditch team to exclude girls. We asked Zoe to call out this injustice with much Slytherin attitude in the line, “No Slytherins, though.”

Devon Bennett (Fred and George the Band), also a dear friend from the Myspace days turned IRL friend, was recruited to add her voice to the rally cry, but she couldn’t help ad libbing her own lyrics. From the beginning of our friendship, she and I have always had healthy banter surrounding the vehement house rivalry between Gryffindor and Slytherin. We expected, and encouraged Devon to throw  some Gryffindor shade in response to the lyric about Slytherins.

 

 

The “Quidditch Witch” recording sessions were a blast and produced, in my opinion, the best song on the EP. It continues to be one of my favorite Swish and Flick tracks. I love that I can hear the voices of my friends and family every time I listen to it, and I remember those fun times in Dungeon Studios.

It was always one of the most fun songs to perform because of the interactive nature of it. I trawled YouTube, trying to find a video of the whole shtick we would do for “Quidditch Witch”, but sadly, I couldn’t find it. I attribute this lack of footage to a combination of the audience putting away their devices during this song to participate, and the fact that the SnF podcast (which we are not involved with) basically dominates the internet search results these days (awesome for them, sucks for us).

Just to give you an idea, if you haven’t seen “Quidditch Witch” performed live, I would preface the song by splitting the audience into two sections, and pit each section against one another. I would teach one part of the rally cry to half the audience (“Chasers, beaters, hexing Death Eaters!”), and the other part to the other half (“Keeper seeker, all the boys are weaker!”). Sometimes I’d call one side Gryffindors and call the other side Slytherin, and have two friends each lead a half of the audience in their part of the rally cry. When it came time for the rally cry during the song, the audience sections would have to compete against each other to see who could be the loudest and most enthusiastic. Whenever Devon was at a show, she’d lead the Gryffindors of course, and throw shade all in good fun.

When we were lucky enough to have Flick’s Flygirls with us on stage, there was an epic dance that went along with the song, choreographed by Staci Ortiz and Olivia Garcia. Check out this video of us performing “Quidditch Witch” at the Quidditch World Cup in NYC. (I was pregnant at the time, and you can see I’m getting winded toward the end, but the Flygirls make up for it.)

And at other times, in the absence of the Flygirls on stage (they were often at wrock shows regardless of wether or not they had to be on stage) I would pit each half of the audience against the other in a sexy dance battle. Check out this video from MISTI-Con 2013, that perfectly depicts the dance battle and house rivalry. Spoiler alert: Neither Gryffindor nor Slytherin win! You have to watch to the end to discover the results of the dance battle!

Do you have a memory of “Quidditch Witch”? Were you a Quidditch player who listened to the song to get pumped before a match? Were you in one of the epic dance battles at a Swish and Flick show? Any other thoughts on “Quidditch Witch”? Drop your memory in the pensive, aka, the comments section.